Google is coming off two exciting weeks of mobile engagement.   First, we had our inaugural Think Mobile event in our NY office hosting executives from hundreds of top advertisers, agencies and publishers.  Top Google executives and industry experts such as Mary Meeker presented data showcasing the rapid growth of mobile and urging businesses to think “mobile first” in 2011 as customer interactions on mobile continue to skyrocket.

Then, last week, 50,000 mobile industry executives descended on Barcelona for Mobile World Congress.  After talking with mobile executives from leading content providers at both events, one message was clear - they get it.  Mobile is big.  Now is the time to take the plunge and engage users on mobile, yet many of these content providers have barely scraped the surface as their mobile teams are constrained by minuscule budgets and a general low ranking on the company’s priority list.

The good news is it is not too late to be early to mobile, but the race is on as a slew of entrepreneurs draft plans to unseat the incumbents.  For those of you working hard to convince your CEO of the urgency to think “mobile first”, I offer the following letter with my advice to your CEO.  Feel free to pass it along to him or her to get the conversation started.

Dear CEO,
Congratulations.  Many of you saw mobile coming before it came – and you hired mobile teams to plan for the future.  I know them – they are smart and are passionate about mobile.  And they are emotionally attached to your mission.  Now let them run free.  Because who is better suited to reinvent your current business for mobile than this group?  Follow these simple rules to see how mobile can transform your business.

1. Build for mobile:  Merely porting your content to a mobile website or app is not enough.  Mobile devices now enable you to use features such as location, voice commands, touchscreens and embedded cameras to create unique, engaging experiences for your users.  Let your mobile team think creatively to discover how best to leverage these features to delight your customers.
   
2. Remove budget constraints: Budgets are created based on last year’s performance and neglect future opportunities.  Invest now in mobile so that you are not blind-sided later by a competitor that provides your customers with a more compelling product.  Give your mobile team license to dream big and have them develop a budget that makes sense for an emerging business.
   
3. Take risks:  Allow this mobile team to act like a start-up.  Let them explore new business models and new ways to package your content for mobile usage.  Do not restrict them with what worked and did not work in print and online.  Focus on delighting your users and then determine how mobile best fits in with the rest of your portfolio.
4. Test and iterate: 3-year plans don’t work in emerging businesses - you need to reevaluate every three months at a minimum.  Give this mobile team a month or two to produce something.  It will not be perfect, but push them to create something you can put in market.  Focus on gathering customer feedback and responding with improvements to your offering.

As you challenge your mobile team to reinvent your business for mobile consumption, let me end on a note that will help you rest easy at night.  We’ve found that mobile usage peaks when desktop wanes making it additive to your existing business.  People want to stay connected wherever they are...at lunch, during the commute, even at the beach while on vacation.  For content providers, that’s good, dare I say great, news.  

Cheers,
Chris

Posted by Chris LaSala, Director Mobile Partnerships

Next week OMMA Global in San Francisco will explore the impact of the latest technology trends on media and marketing. We hope you can join us in learning about the latest news around mobile, social, video and display media.

Google’s Jordan Kobert will be on hand to discuss how advertisers and publishers can remain relevant as user attention moves increasingly to mobile on the “Can Advertisers and Publishers Keep Pace with the Mobile Shift” panel at 2:45 p.m. on February 28th.

Please stop by the Google booth and chat with our YouTube, Doubleclick, Google Display Network and Mobile Ads teams on both days of the conference. Registration is free - we hope to see you there!

Posted by Vicky Homan, Google Mobile Ads Marketing Team

Our friends at Google’s Webmaster Central Blog have put together a list of useful recommendations for making websites mobile friendly. Having a mobile optimized site is an important component of a successful mobile strategy. As such, we encourage you to check out their post for tips on how to best structure a website for mobile phones and how to create effective interactions between mobile content and the Googlebot.

Visit the Webmaster Central Blog to read more.

Posted by Anna Khesed, Google Mobile Ads Marketing Team

Two weeks ago we hosted Mary Meeker at our mobile thought leadership event in New York, Think Mobile. Mary has been known to identify technology trends before they hit mainstream and present conclusions based on data-driven analyses. According to the New York Times, “no one can show more in less time than Mary Meeker.”

At Think Mobile, Mary and her partner Matt Murphy shared their perspective on the growth of the mobile ecosystem to an audience of marketing executives, industry visionaries and agency leaders. Some of the highlights from their session include:

• Smartphone and tablet shipments hit an inflection point in 2010 and exceeded PC shipments for the first time
• Consumer demand for mobile content will drive 92% annualized growth in mobile data traffic over the next 5 years
• Mobile commerce is expected to ramp faster than online commerce did driven by location based services, transparent pricing, and offers 

After the session, we asked Mary for her thoughts ranging from the growth of the mobile Internet to her favorite app. Here’s what she had to say:

The video above only covers a handful of topics from the complete presentation.  A video of Mary’s session at Think Mobile is viewable here.

The slides from her session are available here.

Posted by Harsh Shah, Google Mobile Ads Marketing Team

Interested in learning how the makers of Angry Birds, Cut The Rope and Gun Bros turned their mobile apps into thriving businesses?  Join Google’s Charles Yim, at GDC on Thursday, March 3rd at 10:30am as he moderates the panel “Turning Mobile Games into Moneymakers”.  In this session, executives from leading mobile game companies will discuss strategies for monetizing, marketing and distributing mobile games.  The panelists include Glu Mobile's Mike Breslin, Rovio's Peter Vesterbacka and ZeptoLabs' Misha Lyalin.

Charles Yim manages strategic partnerships with the games industry on behalf of Google’s mobile display advertising business. He works with both traditional and emerging game developers in building their smart-phone businesses and has extensive experience in the online and mobile games eco-system as a venture capital investor and start-up entrepreneur.

The Game Developer Conference in San Francisco kicks off February 28th and typically draws nearly 20,000 game developers to the Moscone Convention Center.   This panel will be part of the Monetization Track and attendees can get access with the following passes: All Access Pass, Audio Pass, Main Conference Pass, Summits and Tutorials Pass.  For more Google events at GDC 2011, check out our conference website here.

Posted by Keri Kandel, Google Mobile Ads Marketing Team

According to Nielsen, YouTube is the #1 mobile video website in the US, with millions of users watching video from a mobile device every day. As mobile video viewership continues to grow rapidly, we are now extending the popular YouTube Brand Channel from YouTube desktop to reach and engage users on high-end devices, including iPhone and Android phones.

Mobile Brand Channels allow advertisers to create a customized mobile brand experience within YouTube. Users can share videos, save to a playlist, subscribe to the channel and rate content through the “thumbs up” YouTube feature. Mobile-specific banners create a wallpaper effect and also enable advertisers to link their Brand Channel to another mobile website.

Brand Channels are discoverable by searching on m.youtube.com. Advertisers can also promote their Brand Channel through mobile advertising on the Google search or display network, as well as YouTube Mobile.

Hyundai Motor America is one of the first advertisers to create a YouTube Mobile Brand Channel. To maximize user engagement, they customized their channel with a mobile-specific banner, promotional text and featured video. To drive traffic to their new mobile experience, Hyundai is running mobile advertising on the AdMob network and also purchased a roadblock of m.youtube.com for 100% share of voice of the mobile YouTube audience.

We congratulate Hyundai on a great mobile video experience and look forward to working with more brands to promote YouTube video content on mobile.

Posted by Vicky Homan, Google Mobile Ads Marketing

This post has been cross-posted from the Google Analytics Blog.

Back in December, we brought you custom variables for your Android applications. Today,
we’re doing the same for our iOS SDK by releasing version 1.1 of the Google Analytics SDK for iPhone with Custom Variable support. We are also offering a NoThumb version of this SDK.

Custom variables can be used to segment your users and provide actionable context. Some great use cases are:

• Free vs. paid: What percentage of users prefer a paid app vs. a free app that delivers ads? Are you making more money on the free version or the paid version?
• Installs by version: What version of your app gained the most users? What version lost users? How quickly are users upgrading?
• Portrait vs. landscape: Do your users prefer to use your application in portrait mode or landscape mode?

For more great ways to use Custom variables in mobile applications, check out Alex Lucas’ great blog post for the Andriod SDK.

In addition, we are providing support for NoThumb with our SDK. We have a NoThumb version of the library as well as the standard, Thumb version. This NoThumb version is available for developers that need the Thumb instruction set disabled in their applications.

Posted by Jim Cotugno, Google Analytics Tracking Team